You can close tasks in several ways. 1 - you swipe the task from the left and then down (although this is a horribly clumsy), 2 - you can go to your desktop and rightmouse / long press the tray icon and choose close, 3 - if you have a mouse you can move it to the top edge of the app, a bar will appear and you can click the close button.

So yes there are ways to kill apps although IMO none of them are very good. I would prefer a proper finger-friendly "running apps" screen where I can either flick them away or hit close. And Microsoft need to present apps, executables and services in a unified and coherent way from this screen.

Gnome 3 is extremely customisable via extensions. It is more accurate to say the default experience is deliberately simple.

If a state is going to execute people then a firing squad is quite able to perform the task reliably and quickly. Hell, it doesn't even need a firing squad - guns can be preaimed and fired remotely with sufficient redundancy to ensure the outcome.

When you start calling people "sheep", "sheeple", "baaa" etc. you think you're being clever but you're coming away looking like a paranoid arrogant jerk who can't possibly accept another point of view. And I suspect that impression is well deserved.

Typescript is balls as a language (for all the reasons JS is) but it's succeeding probably because it's familiar to JS / AS devs and static typing is a good thing. So you can reuse existing JS code and there are TS definition files for most popular JS libs too. So better than JS but still suffering from many of the same issues - strict model, weird binding rules etc.

What is ironic that the two leading JS replacements actually manage to be orthogonal - Typescript adds extra verbiage and Coffeescript attempts to strip out the verbiage.

As for Dart, I think Google spooked devs by intending to add a Dart VM to Chrome. Even if it could compile into JS, it sent the message that their intention was to replace JS with this other thing or run the two side by side. It's not the first time a company has tried to do this - VBscript in IE was another example.

It's not a complete loss. Virtually all of these frameworks are doing the same damned thing and implementing the same damned patterns just with different code. And underneath Angular or WhateverReplacesIt will be the usual heap of JS libs - JQuery, Underscore, Backbone et al. So knowledge is transferable even if AngularJS stops being fashionable.

You clearly have some issues you have to sort out. Starting with your critical thinking skills.

Just fake it. Start by lying you have an unmodified NES and go from there.

It's not being "dumb" it's called reading the article and interpreting the comments in context.

That whole request / reply bit sailed over your head I see. The wire might be asynchronous but Xlib, the library that virtually all client code uses is filled with synchronous code that sends the request and waits for the reply. e.g. call XGetWindowAttributes and it will block until the response comes back.

There have been attempts to use xcb instead which is an async API but it turns out writing async code is hard, particularly when dealing with legacy code and an arcane windowing system that sends out a storm of messages. It's not hard to find xcb backend projects that have floundered.

A pixmap is not a surface. A surface is a texture under the management of a GPU (or software emulation of a GPU). X has no concept of surface. It is damage based windowing system. Hence the reason for extensions to work through this.

If you don't see why it has anything to offer I suggest you look at the Wayland website where it explains in detail why X is broken. If virtually every X developer can see the need then I don't see why others can't.

The point is that partition would be 30MB smaller if it didn't contain the Facebook in the first place. Throw in twitter, some crappy mobile office suite, some antivirus software, some cloud save service and a bunch of other junk and it might be closer to 100MB of wasted space.

Yes it does. 30MB masked out and another 30MB+ for the replacement. That's just one app that I assume most people would keep.

Of course it does. The network operator (or whomever they contract to support their phones) have to receive a (tested) firmware update image from the manufacturer, extract it, throw in all their own changes & apps, compress it, test it again, and roll it out. That could add weeks or months to the process. It quite obviously requires more effort to test, and it reduces the chances that you'll get updates at all - perhaps Vodafone or whoever only supports a phone for 18 months even if the manufacturer is pushing out more updates or security fixes.

First, you don't extend X, you work around it and leave one more bit of dead code to be maintained forever. Second, it is not async.

Sorry you're lying. X11 has no concept of surfaces. The only way of taking advantage of the hardware is to write an extension that composites the scene for X11 and hands it back to X11 to page flip. So X11 is just a 3rd wheel that involves extra context switches for no reason at all.

Oh boo hoo then implement something else.

Run X over wayland if you're so desperate for some crappy broken network protocol. VNC, RDP and others are more efficient.

And Wayland stops you how? Run X11 over wayland and stop crying.

Just leave it alone and think of the bounty of intelligence you will harvest - infiltrate or set up some phony jihadist / paedo / drug & weapons dealing / carding sites and wait for the perps to come to you.

Disabling isn't the same as removing. It's still there, unnecessarily eating up space. Worse than that, if you do use that app you will incur a double penalty as soon as you install an update. So that Facebook baked into your phone might eat up 30MB of space and then you get hit for another 30MB+ in the r/w partition when an update arrives. So if you don't need the app it wastes space and if you do need the app it wastes space. So why bother in the first place?

And of course all that baked in crapware means you won't be getting firmware / security updates for your phone in a timely fashion, if ever.

Google should do is change the terms so certain apps *must* reside in a read/write partition and *must* be removable from the device. Not just hidden but completely removable. That would include every carrier app which is normally redundant and broken anyway. I would include some of Google's own apps in that category - GMail, Chrome, G+, YouTube etc - basically any app that resides on top of the handset OS as opposed to being part of it should be removable by the user. Not just hidden - removable.

Apart from that choice is good. Personally I prefer the vanilla experience, or the CM one (which is a relatively light enhancements). The worst replacement I've seen is the one from Huawei which decided that the all apps view and the personizable desktops should be combined into a single thing creating the most unusable experience I've seen in any smart phone.